Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the ways to  Convert Dynamic JSP pages to a Static HTML to Appear in Google search results?

22nd September 2012

My answer to What are the ways to  Convert Dynamic JSP pages to a Static HTML to Appear in Google search results? on Quora

You don’t have to do anything. You’re misunderstanding how dynamic server-side languages like JSP work.

Hit view source in your browser on a “static” HTML site (if you can find one—they’re increasingly rare these days, and as an end user it’s actually impossible to tell the difference, as I’m about to explain). You’ll see what Google’s search crawler sees: a bunch of HTML.

Now do the same thing on a “dynamically” generated site—anything with a .php or .jsp extension is a good start (since they’re revealing their technology choices through their URL, which is a bit tacky but does at least let you see what the’yre using). You’ll see a bunch of HTML.

Dynamic server-side technologies like JSP, PHP, Django, Rails, ASP.NET etc run on the server—they generate HTML, which is then served to regular users and to search engine crawlers alike. It’s not possible to tell for sure if that HTML was generated by code or is just a single static file that someone hosted on a web server.